Insertion Of A Stent May Save From Leg Amputation

Insertion Of A Stent May Save From Leg Amputation.
When angioplasty fails, patients with inexorable beside the point arterial disease may now have another option. A drug-releasing stent placed in the blocked artery below the knee might re-establish blood flow, unfledged experiment with shows.

Critical limb ischemia, the most severe form of peripheral arterial disease (PAD), causes more than 100000 lap amputations in the United States each year. Now, researchers from Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City roughly insertion of a stent can foil many of these amputations.

In "Traditional balloon angioplasty is plagued by high incidence failure, restenosis (recurrence) and unqualifiedness to elevate the patient's symptoms," said lead researcher Dr Robert A Lookstein, friend director of Mount Sinai's division of interventional radiology. Patients with fault-finding limb ischemia have leg pain even when resting and sores that don't heal because of lack of circulation. They are at endanger of gangrene and amputation.

But placing a stent in the affected artery during angioplasty greatly improves these problems. The drug-eluting stent keeps the narrowed artery announce and releases a medication for several weeks after implantation, preventing the artery from closing again. "Patients with the least frigid construct of the (severe) disease, those with pain at rest, as well as the patients with minor skin infection of their legs, were able to escape major amputation".

But some patients with severe disease and those with gangrene still lost a limb who was scheduled to current the finding Monday at the Society of Interventional Radiology's annual meeting in Tampa, Fla. For the study, Lookstein's tandem followed 53 patients with critical limb ischemia who had a mount up to of 94 drug-eluting stents implanted to treat leg arteries that would not stay open after angioplasty alone. These are the same stents commonly worn to open blocked coronary arteries. The therapy was effective in all the patients, the researchers said.